I earned my "MBA" in Sales the hard way.... from the "School of Hard Knocks"....

To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, Sales gets "no respect" when it comes to learning about the real life challenges and job skills required to build and manage successful sales teams. There are few academic programs that teach you how to set up sales teams, and fewer still that understand the realities of running a business where you have real sales people and real quotas.

This site is about what it takes to do both. Getting your "MBA for Sales" is about real life tools and techniques that you can use to build and manage your team.

Here's my story:

When I first became a Sales Manager, I was the best sales person on my team. Management had high expectations... After all, if I could excel, why couldn’t I just “improve” my entire team?

We all know it doesn’t work that way. A good Sales Executive does not always make a good Sales Manager. There’s a lot of critical things you have to know:

Putting together the weekly sales revenue forecast

Holding sales team meetings where your team now gets to “sand bag” you!

Determining what your sales people are really doing to make sure that they are accountable for their results.

Coaching your team so they can produce results instead of producing all the results yourself.

Creating a new revenue budget for the team you’re going to bootstrap!

Figuring out how to make the marketing materials you despised as a sales person work for your sales team.

I soon realized that I needed a PROCESS to manage the team. I needed the skills and tools to sort out good deals from bad deals, to determine if reps were “sand-bagging" and to tell management what was really going on (and actually believe it!). More important, I was now the in charge of the team - I needed them to perform so I didn't have to be a "one person salesteeam".

I knew that if I didn’t build the right skills, I wasn’t going to be a Sales Manager very long!